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Anyone who's wary of talking fauns and doe-eyed princesses take note: Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is no more a twee fairy tale than Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic comedy. Del Toro, the writer-director best known for his big-budget Hollywood vehicles Blade II and Hellboy, returns to his indie roots with this story of Ofélia, an 11-year-old girl whose mother marries a fascist army commander in Franco-era Spain. To cope with the murderous reality that surrounds her, she escapes into her own fantastical dream world. "I felt that if I did a third film in a row within the studio system, I would die," says del Toro (who just signed on to direct Hellboy II.) "So I said, 'Screw it.' I wanted the freedom and the madness of doing a movie that is not safe by any means."

Like Eternal Sunshine, del Toro's Spanish-language film delves into alternate realities, but it's far darker than Gondry's worst nightmare. Del Toro enlisted many of the people he'd worked with on Hellboy, from Doug Jones, the go-to "creature guy" who plays Pan and other characters, to CafeFX, which created stunning visual effects at a deep discount – enabling the director to deliver the film at just $15 million. The result is a harrowing thriller with personal resonance. "I have been like Ofélia most of my life," del Toro says. "I saw my first corpse at age 4. I have seen people shot. I have found a way to understand the world through very dark fantasies." Indeed, so will you.

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It's a familiar yet nightmarish scenario: In the latest film from Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y Tu Mamá También), set in 2027, humanity can no longer reproduce, and Clive Owen is out to save the last pregnant woman on Earth. Global infertility is rampant in sci-fi, but is it scientifically sound? No way, says Patricia Dranchak of USC's Institute for Genetic Medicine. Only nuclear holocaust could cause such an epidemic, "in which case we'd probably die as a species anyway." Seed-killing microbes? "Unrealistic," genetics expert York Marahrens says. "It would have to be more infectious than the common cold." Phew!

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We're not exactly sure why the holidays require a soundtrack, but with December marches the annual parade of Chrismakkuh Jamz! and personal "best of" compilations. Wired enlisted DJ Whoo Kid, the underground maestro behind hundreds of mixtapes and an inspiration on Eminem's latest, a compilation called The Re-Up, for some tips on making a mix that won't be tossed faster than a fruitcake.

1) Think snort and sweet: "Your fan base has a short attention span," says Kid, who edits tracks down to two minutes. "Treat your mix like it's cocaine – go with quick blasts of songs." Keep each mix's running time below 6o minutes.

2) Playlist over party shuffle: The most common rookie mistake, according to Kid, is sloppy sequencing. "Figure out a theme and stick with it," he says. "You can't have a crazy fast track, then a slow one." Kid finesses choppy flow by inserting custom sound effects (pacdv.com/sounds offers free MP3 clips).

3) Know your audience: Kid's mixes feature hip-hop crowdpleasers and unknown MCs. Standard rule: If you have to explain more than twice who a band is and why it matters, your CD will end up a shiny coaster.

4) Follow the 24-hour rule: "You're not making an album," Kid says. "A good mixtape should take only a day to make." In other words, don't overthink it.

5) Be prolific: Instead of a four-disc year-end box set, hand out mixtapes several times a year. "If you don't, people lose interest," Kid says, and they'll move on to the next up-and-comer, like, say, your Uncle Steve.

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Last summer, 21-year-old British bubble-gum rapper Lily Allen had the UK grinning along to "Smile," the chart-topping single from her debut album, Alright, Still. Breezy ska-pop beats and sassy lyrics may have made Allen a big hit in her home country, but her MySpace profile boosted her to international stardom. Unlike most MySpace acts, the singer had already scored a record deal, but Allen was under the radar until she posted four tracks on the social-networking site. In just a few months, the tunes caught the attention of savvy fans and besotted bloggers, who anointed Allen "the blogosphere's download darling." The collection has since been played more than a million times on MySpace, with American listeners making up two-thirds of her online audience, according to the singer. This all happened, it's worth noting, six months before the US release of Alright, Still, scheduled for late January 2007.

Allen's early success stateside raises a somewhat cynical – but necessary – question: Now that the MySpace creation myth is becoming increasingly cliché (fellow Brits the Arctic Monkeys are a recent example) is there such a thing
as too much buzz? Overhyped acts – especially of the online, UK-wunderkind variety – are more prone to a sort of frontlash. Such bands are deemed "so five minutes ago" by fickle fans even before the album hits the shelves. For her part, Allen is taking it in stride: "I'm 21, and it's just a job," she says. "If my career falls apart in six months, it's not the end of the world." For now, Allen's got plenty to smile about.

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The most important issue you knuckle-dragging savages faced in the early 21st century: nuclear proliferation? No! It was figuring out which of the then-new videogame consoles was most l33t (such ancient slang). The game-ologists at Wired magazine, which purported to foretell the future yet used archaic wood-pulp printing techniques, were stumped. So they asked the most authoritative source in the galaxy – my creators at Penny-Arcade.com. Wordmaster Jerry Holkins and illustrator Mike Krahulik’s thrice-weekly webcomic and blog was the final word on everything from the idiocy of antigame crusaders like Jack Thompson to the absurdly powerful ninja foes in Mario Hoops 3-on-3. They had me report from the future with advice on the console dilemma.

Click HERE to download the hi-res version of the first page of the comic.

Click HERE to download the hi-res version of the second page of the comic.

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Bugs Bunny is deceased! Wile E. Coyote? Roadkill. And Donald is one dead duck. That’s the premise behind Animatus, an exhibit by artist Hyungkoo Lee that envisions cartoon characters from Warner Bros., Disney, and other studios sans fur, feathers, and flesh. The challenge in creating the 3-D polyester-resin skeletons was that the creatures exist only in a 2-D universe. To reverse-engineer their underlying structures, Lee applied a bit of Forensics 101. By observing the anatomy of each character’s real-life counterpart and incorporating human kinesiology, he was able to figure out how an accident-prone anthropomorphic animal’s femur or spinal column would look. Lee studied, sketched, and sculpted the skulls of birds, felines, mice, and other creatures to get the cranial features just right. The resulting noggins are realistic enough to give the most sharp-eyed art patron pause. If you want to check out Animatus, you better order a rocket-propelled sled from Acme. After its debut at the Arario Gallery in South Korea, the ossified menagerie headed to Turin, Italy, where it will be on display through January.

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For half a century, Marvin Minsky has tried to mechanize the mind. In his new book, The Emotion Machine, the AI pioneer posits that anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling. The idea will surely stir up controversy. But Minsky – who cofounded MIT's AI Lab and advised director Stanley Kubrick during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey – wants to make us think. His groundbreaking tome The Society of Mind, published in 1986, argued there's no central conductor of operations in your head, just agents working together to create awareness. In the spirit of collective consciousness, Wired challenged Minsky to a meeting of the minds with philosopher Daniel Dennett, codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and the author of several seminal brain books with heady titles like Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

WIRED: What's wrong with the traditional approach to how the brain works?
Minsky: Physics gives us about five laws that explain almost everything. So we keep looking for those kinds of simple laws to apply to the brain. The idea in my new book is that you shouldn't be looking for a single explanation of how thinking works. Evolution has found hundreds of ways to do things, and when one of them fails, your mind switches to another. That's resourcefulness.

In The Emotion Machine, you argue that feelings result from switching on or off certain "mental resources."
Minsky: The traditional view of emotions is that they are something extra, like adding color to a black-and-white photograph. But to me, emotions are what happens when you remove other resources. Anger means you've turned off your social graces, you've turned off your cautiousness, you've turned off your long-range plans and most of your ambition, and you've turned on things that make you act more rapidly and less deeply. Recognizing this complexity adds dignity to the theory.Dennett: Computer programmers have the luxury to create hierarchies of control. The systems, the subsystems, the sub-sub-subsystems are complete slaves. They never rebel. This gives you a model of the mind with the highest echelons of logic at the top. But if you think about a brain as a community of individually semiautonomous, even independently evolved agencies, as Marvin has, you realize that the agencies have to be browbeaten and they have to form alliances. Emotions aren't an add-on but rather the politics of the whole system.

So what would a machine that worked this way look like?
Dennett: Like us.Minsky: A well-designed program that wouldn't be so hierarchical but more like a network with resources that make requests of other resources. Dennett: The research world is going to be impatient with Marvin because they are eager for computational models that really work. Marvin is saying, "Wait a minute, let's work out some of the high-level architectural details in a way that's still very loose, very impressionistic. It's too early to build the big model."Minsky: Actually, I could quarrel with that. I think the architecture described in The Emotion Machine is programmable. If I could afford to get three or four first-rate systems programmers, we could do it. You can get millions of dollars to drive a car through a desert, but you can't get money to try to do something that's more human.

Why is the idea of a thinking machine so compelling?
Minsky: I think there is a worldwide survival problem. As the population grows and people live longer, there won't be anybody to do the work. So there is an urgent need to make inexpensive mechanical people that are able to do all the things that moderately unskilled people do now.Dennett: I don't find that very convincing, Marvin. I think we're interested in it for purely curious, scientific reasons. We want to know how we work.Minsky: Or make machines that work better than us and can solve all the problems we wanted to but couldn't. As Hans Moravec used to say, "The machines will be us."Dennett: Marvin, I have a slogan for you that came to mind while I was reading your book. I've used it myself as a paper title. "My body has a mind of its own, so what does it need me for?"Minsky: [Laughs.] I once peeled a label off a London bus. It read: MIND YOUR HEAD.

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Behind every new new thing is a visionary with a brilliant idea. In Designing Interactions, his 800-page opus with accompanying DVD, IDEO cofounder Bill Moggridge is our guide for a long walk down Silicon Valley's relatively short memory lane, narrating interviews with the people who shape "the way people interact with computer technology." Subjects include Larry, Sergey, and 38 others you probably don't know. But you should, because these interaction designers have constructed the hybrid physical-virtual environment we live in, from the first mouse to the latest Treo. It's a sometimes mind-altering exploration of a world you thought you already knew. Check out a few of our favorite memories.

Breakthrough Moments in Silicon Valley History

• Think amateur
When it comes to interactive design, Steve Jobs is the elephant in the room. Of course, he didn't sit for an interview. But we do get to hear his voice. Shortly after returning to Apple in 1996, Jobs summoned senior interface designer Cordell Ratzlaff to talk about OS 8 and, as Ratzlaff tells Moggridge, said:

"You guys designed Mac OS, huh?"

"Yeah, we did that," Ratzlaff replied.

"I've got to tell you, you're a bunch of amateurs!"

• Desktop file cabinet
One afternoon in the '70s, Tim Mott (who would cofound Electronic Arts in 1982) was sitting in a Silicon Valley bar trying to think up an interface for storing files created by the "text editor" he and Xerox PARC cohort Larry Tesler had just invented. "I was thinking about what happens in an office," Mott recalls. "Someone's got a document, and they want to file it, so they walk over to the file cabinet and put it in the file cabinet. Or they want to throw it away, so they reach under their desk and toss it in the trash can." Eureka! The desktop was born on a bar napkin. Pass the beer nuts.

• Graphic content
While in radar school during WWII, Doug Engelbart figured that if a computer could punch cards or print on paper, it could display stuff on a screen. It would take another 20 years, but that insight was at the heart of the first graphical user interface. "There was no question that the engineering would be feasible," Engelbart tells Moggridge. "You could interact with a computer and see things on a screen."

• The wrong tail
The mechanics of the first production mouse were not without issues. To begin with, there was the "tail": If the cord was too stiff, the mouse moved on its own; too floppy and it tripped over itself. Then there was the button: Early schematics called for a switch rated for 100,000 clicks – nowhere near enough for a true GUI. "That switch would have lasted two weeks," Tesler moaned. Especially with all that double-clicking, which is a story in itself.

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Of all the teams in the classic road-rally movie The Cannonball Run, our faves aren't Burt and Dom or Dean and Sammy. We always root for Jackie Chan. Even way back in 1981, Chan and his engineer copilot had the geek thing down, donning night-vision goggles, engaging their tricked-out Subaru's "silent mode," and slipping by incredulous highway patrolmen at 125 miles per hour. Needless to say, their tech-­clueless opponents were radar fodder.

More than three decades on, endurance rallies – Bullrun, Cannonball 3000, Carbon Black, and others – are prime turf for a supercharged fusion of gears and gadgets. Today's competitors approach the events with a toolbox that includes laser jammers, gyroscope-stabilized binoculars, police scanners, and thermal imaging cameras. Sure, some dilettantes are content to simply hurl their exotic sports cars from checkpoint to checkpoint, hoping to skirt the cops. But the pros drop fighter-pilot jargon like "situational awareness" and employ the latest electronics to stay one step ahead of the heat. Their goal, of course, is to finish with the best time, stay safe, and avoid "capture." Here's an exclusive peek at a modded BMW from the garage of the current Jackie Chan of rally, Alexander Roy.

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Finally, scholars have a place to conduct Astro Boy studies. Robothink, Japan's first bot museum, opened its doors this fall. The 28,000-square-foot facility is housed in a former used-car dealership in Nagoya. From Robby to Aibo, the droid depository features dozens of actual automatons, plus replicas of real and fictional bots. Honda's Asimo and Mitsubishi's Wakamaru are on hand to interface with patrons, and there's a library, a café, and a gift shop that sells T-shirts, mugs, and $5,000 bots. Here are a few choice machines from the collection – hope they're all compliant with Asimov's Four Laws.

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For thousands of years, carved wood or stone were the standard for Japanese hanko – personal seals used in place of signatures on official documents. But the ancient technology is ridiculously easy to duplicate, leading to a rise in hanko forgery and theft. To fight hanko crime, Mitsubishi came up with the Dialbank In, a 21,000-yen ($178) seal that replicates a user's personalized mark on a series of concentric stainless steel rings. Dial in the two-digit code on the briefcase-like combination lock and the hanko's intricate design rotates into proper alignment. Don't leave home without it.

"In the final decade of the 21st century, men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon," intones the narrator of this seminal 1956 sci-fi blockbuster, which is still great fun, despite (or because of?) its hilariously dated vision of the future. Leslie Nielsen stars as Commander J. J. Adams of the United Planets Cruiser C-57D – a clear precursor to Captain Kirk and his Starship Enterprise. The clever story line alludes to Freud and Shakespeare, and the f/x look terrific in this restored DVD set, which includes four hours of documentaries and deleted scenes, plus a Dolby 5.1 remix that envelops you in the bleeps and plinks of the first-ever completely electronic film score.
– Chris Baker

Print
The Scientist as Rebel
Freeman Dyson
Physicist and futurist Dyson embodies the ideal of the scientist as iconoclast. In this spirited collection, he muses on the ethics of nanotech and genetic engineering, the crucial role of amateurs in science, and the richness of "nature's imagination." Provocative, touching, and always surprising.
– Steve Silberman

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Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon
At 1,085 pages, the reclusive legend's first opus since '97 is, um, challenging (we still haven't finished it). Beyond length, there are convoluted conspiracies (typical) involving a secret society (ditto) of neo-Pythagoreans. ATD also features an invention that allows people to breathe underneath sand. Awesome!
– Steven Leckart

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The Physics of the Buffyverse
Jennifer Ouellette
When the local high school sits atop a gateway to hell and the only thing preventing Earth's destruction is a 5'3", 100-pound blonde, you wouldn't expect science to play a large role. But as Ouellette's tongue-in-cheek study shows, much of Buffy the Vampire Slayer conforms (sort of) to real-world biology, chemistry, and physics.
– Greta Lorge

Music
Various Artists
Plague Songs
Ten songs that draw on the 10 Biblical plagues? Pure pop gold. Locust samples chatter through Imogen Heap's OC-ready "Glittering Cloud," while Stephin Merritt's "The Meaning of Lice" sets the Israelites' enslavement to a jaunty disco beat. Can we get an amen?
– Sean Cooper

Screen (Theaters)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) takes on Patrick Süskind's dark fairy tale about a murderer with a superhuman olfactory sense. The film never rises to the challenge of conveying scent onscreen (where's Smell-o-Vision when you need it?), but you could get high on the sensuous visuals.
– Alison Willmore

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Games
The Arcade Wire: Airport Security
In this travel sim, you're a TSA agent making sure a constantly changing list of banned items don't get on board. Don't let any snakes on the plane.

Screen
The Da Vinci Code DVD
The film version of Dan Brown's novel wasn't quite a thrilling wild-goose chase, but the DVD is. To unlock its codes, be quick on the Pause button – and arm yourself with a black light.

Print
Japanamerica
Embrace the world of otaku in Roland Kelts' comprehensive study of how Japanese pop culture enchanted the West, from Speed Racer and Pokémon to cosplay and hentai manga.

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Screen
For a Lazy Sunday
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE FOUR-DISC EXTENDED EDITION

Narniacs rejoice! This lavish set gets The Lord of the Rings treatment: An extended version of the movie and previously released bonus features are joined by an excellent documentary on author C.S. Lewis. Turns out, he probably wouldn’t have loved his “fairy stories” so much if a frozen thumb knuckle hadn’t kept him out of sports. The best new extra is a dense, for-fans-only mashup that crams storyboards, computer mock-ups, creative team interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, f/x minutiae, and the movie itself onto three split screens. Like Turkish delight, it’s crazy delicious.
– Chad Jones

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Pick Me Up: Stuff You Need to Know
David Roberts and Jeremy Leslie
When you’ve grown up on Google, a traditional reference book doesn’t cut it. Pick Me Up is stuffed with meaty infographics and full-page photos. Color-coded by theme and sprinkled with comic relief, it’s like a great Web search: It takes you places you weren’t headed, but are glad to have visited.
– Jennifer Hillner

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How Nearly Everything Was Invented
Jilly MacLeod, Lisa Swerling, and Ralph Lazar
With sweetly illustrated histories of everything from safety pins and space hotels to endoscopes and sliced bread, Invented brings to mind the magic of Richard Scarry. The ­narrators’ running commentary is smart and punny.
– Joanna Pearlstein

Music
Wee Hairy Beasties
Animal Crackers
Children’s music is the new punk rock, so why shouldn’t punk vets Jon Langford and Sally Timms (of the Mekons) form a band named for – and sing songs about – wee hairy beasties? Animal Crackers overflows with the sound of musicians having fun, which means you and your offspring will, too.
– Stefan Shepherd

Music
The Sippy Cups
Electric Storyland
When a kids’ album pays homage to Jimi Hendrix, you know you’re way beyond the land of purple dinosaurs. The Sippy Cups harness the childlike euphoria of psychedelia and the energy of power pop to deliver music that passes a crucial test: Repeated listenings won’t drive the parents mad.
– Jon J. Eilenberg

Games (Nintendo DS)
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime
Slimes are a race of roly-poly baddies in the popular Dragon Quest RPG series. But in this installment, a heroic (and viscous) young Slime must save his kingdom from invaders. While the dialog-heavy setup is interminable, the raging tank battles – Slimes can be fired like ammo! – are a blast.
– Brian Ashcraft

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Music
Various Artists: All Together Now
Show your kids that the Beatles aren't just for fogies with this book and CD combo, featuring Fab Four fun facts and covers by artists like The Bangles.

Print
The Art Book for Children
This guide to famous works of art asks readers to ponder the number of yellows in van Gogh's "Sunflowers" and the meaning of Mona Lisa's smile. Perfect for the next generation of clove cigarette-smoking art students.

Games
Sam & Max: Season 1
The canine and lagomorph crime-fighting duo from the 1980s comic Sam & Max is back in a PC-only six-episode game at telltalegames.com.